Arrogant police chiefs despise democracy

If you want to understand why we no longer give coppers the benefit of the doubt, read this piece by Andy Hayman, a former chief constable.

The rest of the country is fuming about l'affaire Green, and in particular about the abominable way that the Metropolitan Police behaved, deploying twenty anti-terrorism officers against a middle-aged Tory MP, his amiable wife and one of their teenage daughters. There is anger, too, about the way politicians facilitated this atrocity. Insistent questions are being asked of the Home Secretary and of our abject Speaker.

One politician, however, emerges with unblemished honour. Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, behaved exactly as most voters would have wished, defending parliamentary privilege, performing the role that the Speaker had lamentably shirked, and telling the police in blunt terms that they should not go ahead.

Although he is the chairman of the Metropolitan Police Authority, Boris doesn't run the Met. He would if it were up to me, but that's another story. Still, within the letter of what is permissible, Boris did what he could to prevent the Met from making a terrible blunder.

Are coppers ruefully regretting that they didn't listen? Not a bit of it. "The police are increasingly agitated about how the political class – in particular the Mayor of London – has handled the Damian Green affair", Andy Hayman tells the Met's in-house newsletterThe Times. It is, he rages, "nothing less than political interference in operational policing".

If so, let's have more of it. There was a time when most of us would instinctively have wanted to trust the police. But the reservoir of goodwill was drained during the baleful Blair years. If our elected representatives are now "interfering" with the police, then thank Heaven. Since when was democracy a dirty word?

Here is Hayman's key passage. Read it slowly:

"When I was a chief constable, I regularly called my police authority chairman to appraise him of sensitive operations. He would occasionally seek clarification but the last thing I expected was for him to question in public whether the operation was appropriate".

You see? For the people's tribune even to question a copper is objectionable to our public sector elites. Hayman unwittingly provides the neatest possible demonstration of what is wrong with the current model. As things stand, police authorities tend to see it as their job to defend "their" chief constable from public criticism; in fact their job is precisely the opposite. A state in which politicians meekly do whatever the police want is the very definition of a police state.

If there was anyone left last week who still didn't see the need for elected Sheriffs, I hope they do now.